Commissioner’s Notes

Week 7 is down and we’ve now reached the midpoint of the season. It was a pretty exciting week in CFB with 16 games decided by 3 or fewer points or in OT. In our game we had a very close 1-2-3 battle with only about 20 points per spot of separation. Now that we’re at the halfway point, I’ll look at our performances in the game so far: how we’ve fared, who drafted well and who’s hitting the free agents the hardest, who’s getting the most out of their teams, and the PVP picture moving into the last 3 weeks of playoff seeding games.

Choke Job of the Week

…was nearly Miami, but they were saved by a borderline holding call. There weren’t a lot of choke jobs, maybe Georgia and Texas, but those were still good teams. The best contender for CJOW is Temple, who was nearly a 20-point favorite over arguably one of the worst teams in FBS.

The Week Ahead

PVP Matchups

• #1 Zach (5-2) vs #5 Bruce (3-4)
• #2 Dylan (5-2) vs #4 Bob (3-4)
• #3 Dan (3-4) vs #6 Jacob (2-5)

Games of the week

• Tuesday: South Alabama @ Marshall. South Alabama is a slight favorite and tied for the lead in their division with LA Tech, who they play next week. A loss here would put them a big step back, especially if they lose again next week.

• Wednesday: only one game, New Mexico State @ Sam Houston, and they’re both terrible.

• Thursday: any/none; these are all ~80% ESPN projected winners and ~10-point favorites.

• Friday: Duke @ Virginia. Both teams are pretty far down the ACC standings, but they’re close to each other.

• Saturday Noon: either LSU @ Auburn or Indiana @ Michigan. Both feature a much better team on the road, but both home teams have high ceilings and could steal a win. I could see one or both of these underdogs winning. Bonus Sicko Bowl: Akron (#134 FPI) @ Kent State (#135 FPI). They have a single win between them against an FBS opponent, and that opponent is Ball State (#131 FPI).

• Saturday Afternoon: Tennessee @ South Carolina, one of the biggest toss-ups of the whole week, with huge playoff implications for Tennessee, as a loss would put them really behind the sticks with Kentucky coming to town next week. Bonus: yet another Sicko Bowl, this one even sicker, with Sac State (dead-last FPI, winless against FBS) @ Ball State (only win against #129 Bowling Green). If you like bad football, the MAC is feeding you this weekend.

• Saturday Primetime: several good games in this time slot, so I’ll just list all of them:

  • Virginia Tech @ Clemson: two inconsistent but not terrible teams, and both really can’t afford to lose if they want to stay in the ACC hunt.
  • Georgia State @ Arkansas State: both are in the middle of their divisions, so they’re similarly fighting to stay alive, and both are near .500, so this one may end up being important for bowl eligibility for one or both of them.
  • Ole Miss @ Texas: can Texas right the ship? They’ve had two consecutive losses to decent teams, but not teams good enough for a team of Texas’s alleged caliber to lose to.
  • USC @ Wisconsin: Wisconsin has been sneaky good after a week 1 blowout against ND, so this is a good test for USC, which has played a relatively soft schedule so far.
  • UTSA @ Tulane: UTSA is separating from the pack in the AAC and Tulane clearly hasn’t completely disappeared, as we saw this week against Memphis.

• Saturday Late Night: only two good games, but they both look great: a very good G6 matchup in North Dakota State @ New Mexico, where the winner will probably be one of the most likely G6 playoff teams after Boise and JMU, and a ranked-vs-overranked Houston @ Utah, the latter of whom is absurdly ranked ahead of Tennessee because AP voters don’t know what they’re talking about.

Season So Far Recap

Last week, at the almost-halfway point, I looked at how we’ve done collectively vs the spread. This week, I’ll look at how we’ve done within the confines of the game.

Draft and Free Agent Performance

To jog your memory about the draft, you can re-read the Draft Recap post from right after the draft.

In the figure below, I’ve plotted the number of points we’ve received by round, the number of times we’ve played them, and the average number of points per time they’ve been played.

If you notice, the total points played decreases greatly after the first few rounds, which were also the rounds where we had a near-consensus between pods. These are the top overall performers – worth a ton of points because they’ve been favorites nearly every week and have been winning by plenty every week. But if you look at the later rounds, the points per play doesn’t tail off and even slightly increases, while the times played falls off the map. In my opinion, this signals at least decent drafting by us collectively – we’re not wasting early picks on teams (except, shudder, Oregon) and we’re making efficient use of our last few picks to round out the rosters. In between, we picked up our G6 and “depth” teams that can be used in a pinch when our elite teams are on a bye, but are not the workhorses that the early rounds are.

Here is the same data broken up by player, with your pod and the overall trendlines matched up. A lot of this is just noise that can be thrown off by one outlier. As a pity-party example, I’ll point out that everybody but 1 player is way above the average for their first pick, because Oregon has been that bad. But if you want to see where your standouts are, you can compare this to your own notes or the draft recap to see which teams were your smart picks.

We can also look at the share of where our points come from, broken up by draft spot and free agency.

This line is a lot smoother, because an individual team can only make up 1/16th of your weekly lineup plays and usually no more than ~20-30% of your weekly points. But it emphasizes the importance of good FA moves, which are worth a lot of points.

The graph below displays similar information in a different format.

This is a representation of what share of your points you got from your top n most productive teams (i.e., far left is what percentage came from your single highest overall scorer and far right is 100% from all your teams). The steeper the graph, the more you’re reliant on a few heavy hitters, and the smoother and flatter the graph, the more spread out your points are across greater depth. Above the 100 line is the danger zone – these are teams that are, on net, a drain.

Performances by Team and Spot

Here we can see the performances for each player’s average scorecard (P4 flexes and G6 flexes have been summed). I don’t think there are many conclusions that can be drawn here, but it’s a helpful overview of what our rosters look like and where our points come from.

Performances by player

For overall performances, the graphs and data don’t show much that the standings table doesn’t. Bob and Dylan are leading in both pod wins and overall wins, with the rest of us trailing.

The only interesting things here are that Dylan has never finished 2nd in the Orange pod, with only 4 wins and 3 last-place finishes, and that Jacob, despite a 2-5 PVP record, has finished 3rd overall more times than any other player has finished in any other overall spot.

PVP Standings and Scenarios

Finally, a look ahead at the last 3 weeks of PVP for the “playoff” seeding. As a reminder, the pod winners get a bye, not the top 2 overall, so the White pod is still a heated battle for a bye spot, and with the whole pod currently sitting at 3-4, everybody has a shot at it. When accounting for past performance, Bob builds an edge over the pod and is nearly the odds-on favorite to win the pod at 48%. Because Dylan and I are tied and 2 games ahead of the next cluster, the #1 overall spot is essentially guaranteed to go to our pod, but that might not be beneficial. Because Jacob has one of the most disproportionately bad records, he is the most likely to finish last, but he could also be one of the most likely lower seeds to upset a higher seed. Below are the odds of each player to finish in each spot; “equal odds” assumes each game is 50/50, and “form-weighted” takes everyone pairwise and weights the odds based on their average A vs B scores (i.e., in what percentage of the previous weeks of the season you would have beaten this week’s opponent).

I’ve also added a remaining games simulator to the app where you make your picks, if you want to mock out some scenarios and see where you stand.

The supplementary information for this week, including the rest of the charts from this analysis and an explanation of each, can be found on the 2026 Week 7 Supplementary Information page.

Commissioner’s Notes

Another week down and we’re now nearing the halfway mark. College football had some close wins across the board and some… not-so-close wins. FSU’s coaching search needs to be in full gear at the start of business on Monday. Georgia should be the unanimous #1, Florida sucks, and Indiana is a bitter disappointment, but not as much as Virginia Tech, Texas, LSU, or any of the many teams that could’ve flipped this week for me.

This week, we had the second-closest week in the PVPs, with the White pod stealing two wins by a combined 23 points. Dylan separated himself from the pack by all three metrics, but Bob and I aren’t totally out of reach. There are 13 weeks in the season, so next week, at the midpoint, I’ll do a more comprehensive review of where we fit in the standings. For this week, we’ll look into the spreads.

Games of the week

• Tuesday – FIU @ Jacksonville State. These teams were the winners of two top C-USA matchups this past Wednesday, so this is another big matchup with CCG implications. FIU still has Liberty and Kennesaw State later in the season, so they probably need this one much more than Jacksonville State does.
• Wednesday – either? None of these are great teams. These 4 teams have a combined win total of 5, so somebody has to win, but the more closely matched game by FPI and spread is Western Kentucky @ Sam Houston.
• Thursday – again, some pretty lopsided games. Go do a hobby and skip these. If you have to pick one, maybe go with Colorado State @ Texas State. These seem like ever-so-slightly better teams.
• Friday – App State @ Coastal Carolina. These are two teams that have struggled a bit but are pretty close.
• Saturday Noon – Ohio State @ Indiana. I’m not the highest on Indiana, but they’re still good and I expect this to be a good game.
• Saturday Afternoon – Third Saturday in October, with an honorable mention to Missouri @ Ole Miss. TSIO could get out of hand if the Tennessee offense does not make massive improvements over the next 6 days.
• Saturday Primetime – Notre Dame @ BYU, the Battle of the Religious Avatars. BYU looks like a paper tiger to me, but they’re by far ND’s biggest test so far.
• Saturday Late Night – none again; these are all expected blowouts. Go to bed.

PVP Matchups

• #1 Dylan (5-1) vs #2 Zach (4-2)
• #3 Bob (3-3) vs #6 Jacob (1-5)
• #4 Bruce (3-3) vs #5 Dan (2-4)

Looking at the spreads

As you may have noticed from watching the scoreboards over the weeks, the projected outcomes very often do not match up with what happens. This game is often won or lost on a team here or there that’s a 3-point favorite losing by 3 touchdowns or winning by 30. This week, I looked at our various performances vs the spread and looked for places where a few really bad games or weeks ruined somebody.

Here we see the outcome of every game we played, showing predicted margin (i.e., inverse spread) vs actual margin. Most games really do line up right along the expected line, but there are some clear outliers.

There are few, if any, really good conclusions you can draw from that; it’s mostly noise, but you can find patterns if you look long enough. One thing I notice is that I’m slightly overrepresented in the right-of-the-line games with high spreads (i.e., favorites doing even better than expected) as well as the left-of-the-line games with low spreads (i.e., toss-ups where the slight favorite got blown out). This likely explains why it always feels like I’m losing in the most frustrating games but am still high in the standings.

On a weekly basis, everybody has had a week where the odds gods have been out to get them. Jacob and Bruce are the worst off in this regard, which explains why they’re trailing. Dylan’s best weeks and most of his net positive spreads are from the last two weeks, which likewise explains his surge. Below is everyone’s week-by-week and cumulative performance vs the spread.

In PVP matchups, against-the-spread results have shifted several matchups, especially recently. There have been 20 total games that could have shifted the PVP wins, including 9 this week. This week’s games are listed in the table below; 5 games each had bigger ATS differences than the total margin between Bruce and Jacob, and 4 between Bob and me.

Finally, we’ll take a quick glance at the biggest offenders for beating and missing the spread.

The top teams vs the spread average 9.3-19.4 points per game better than the spread. Unsurprisingly, Dylan is the most represented here with 5 of them. Jacob and Bruce have only 2 and 1, respectively.

In the bottom teams, these losers are missing expectations by 5.3-13.0 points per game. Again, no surprise who has these: Bruce and Jacob lead, Dylan and Dan trail. Coincidentally, both Bob and I are well represented in both.

And lastly, one interesting aspect to look at is teams that are missing in either direction. These are landmines. It doesn’t help much if a team is a 10-point underdog and wins by 10 and then the next week is a 10-point favorite and loses by 10. You need some degree of consistency and reliability to even be able to confidently pick them on a weekly basis. The top 10 hot and cold teams are listed below by the sum of their absolute divergence from the spread. These are the teams that will burn you one week and save you the next.